Green Giants: Our Love Affair with Trees
    Below are some excerpts from an article published on April 25 in the British publication THE INDEPENDENT. The writer expresses well the delight millions of us tree lovers experience every spring. And the writer asks a provocative question. Just WHY do we love big, beautiful trees so much? Do we carry this love in our genes, from hundreds of generations ago, before we became farmers, when we lived in the forests?–April Moore
    On the way to work tomorrow, as you hurry, head bowed, to the crowded bus-stop or station, or pause in the car at the red traffic light, feeling your blood pressure start to mount as you see that, on the other side of the junction, the traffic still isn’t moving, do yourself a massive favour: look up.What may swim into your line of sight is greenery. We’ve been without it for five months, do you realise? And now it’s back. Those things called trees, those tall roadside posts that for the whole winter long you haven’t glanced at, that have seemed no more than dark straggly alternative streetlamps without the lighting, have suddenly in the past 10 days sprouted life, and now, this week, are at their most intense.
    For example, look at the horse chestnuts, the conker trees beloved of schoolboys, if you live in an area lucky enough to have them. Go on, look. Once you do, you’d have to have a soul made of concrete not be stirred, for right now, at least in southern Britain, the buds have just burst and the leaves have poured forth and they are of a quite spectacular colour. It’s green, of course, but it’s a special green, it is more than emerald, it is iridescent, as if the leaves were fresh-painted, as if they were glowing from the inside.
     Cherry blossom and apple blossom is out now in gardens, as are the lilacs, and in hawthorn hedges there is a green mist of leaf wrapped around the branches. Greenery is bursting out everywhere on the trees in our towns and cities and suburbs, so much so that if you do look up from the slog to work and catch a glimpse of it, your soul will lift.
    Why do we love trees? We can think of many practical reasons – the wood, the shade, the shelter, the apples, the pears – but there are deeper reasons too. Beauty is obviously one.    Â
    It isn’t only trees in spring blossom that move us; trees in autumn colours are another still-life firework display. Even trees in high summer, the least interesting part of the period in leaf, can provide a spectacle, such as the beeches of the woodlands of the Chilterns, whose tall, straight trunks, combined with the light falling between them, give the appearance of leafy cathedrals.
     Yet perhaps there is something even beyond beauty in our attachment to the oak and the ash, the lime and the hornbeam, the yew and the Scots pine. In the last 20 years the new discipline of evolutionary psychology has made many suggestive interpretations of the origins of human feeling, taking them back to our distant ancestors; the rationale is that we have been office workers for four generations, and we were farmers for about 400 generations; but before farming, we were hunter-gatherers for 20,000 generations or more, and much of our genetic make up must have been constructed then.
    There’s no proof of this, of course; there can only be suggestions, but they are powerful ones (why do all children like to hide? Because the children who didn’t hide, when the predators or the attackers came, didn’t survive to pass on their genes). Is there perhaps something in us that goes far, far back, to account for our love of trees, something more than beauty or utility? Some deeper attachment formed during the aeons when we lived in the forest?
    It’s fanciful, of course it is, especially now most of us only have the street, the house, or the block of flats; and we can never know. But we do know that when the trees that grace our street, our road, our courtyard, are threatened with toppling, we do not like it one bit.
To read the entire article,
May 9th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Lovely, April . . . .and a connection I have felt my whole life. Did you ever read the story “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein? It’s a “children’s” book and makes me sob every time I read it. Silly as it is to say, I DO like the question “What kind of tree would you be?,” the famous or infamous Barbara Walters question. It says so much about a person to think of what knd of tree they would want to be. I love trees because they are rooted. No pun inendead. They are THERE. They are stable. They give and give and give and give. I had thought of being a tree person years ago because they are so comforting and sustaining and pure and stirring and so good to hug and protect.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Yes, I have read “The Giving Tree.” Reading it has always been a painful experience; the tree gives and gives and gives, while the man just keeps taking. This book seems to be a metaphor for humanity’s relationship with the planet today. We have taken so much, and if the planet is to survive, we must learn to give back, and we need to take much more gently.